While UK courts made their traditionally slow start to the new year, a hearing in Istanbul managed to pack more than 100 lawyers onto its benches on January 3rd.

The mass trial of Kurdish and Turkish lawyers has raised concern among the international legal community about the state of justice in one of NATO's more powerful members. Turkey is also a member of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.

The lastest hearing was the continuation of a case that began in November when 46 lawyers - who have all at some point represented the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan - appeared on terrorist charges.

They are accused of passing on his orders to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). All the lawyers, most of whom remain in prison, deny the charges.

Tony Fisher, of the Law Society's human rights committee, has attended several sessions of the trial in Istanbul as an observer. Conversations between lawyers and a client, that in the UK would normally be considered to be private, he reports, have been intercepted by the Turkish authorities.

"Whatever the merits of the charges or the culpability of individual lawyers," Fisher commented, "the methods used to collate evidence are clearly in breach of fundamental elements of legal professional privilege. Routine recording of privileged interviews is perhaps the most fundamental breach of the lawyer/client relationship."

His report of the latest hearing in the special Istanbul criminal court suggested that the case breaches the United Nation's Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers.

That document, adopted by the UN in 1990, states that: "Lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients' causes as a result of discharging their functions".

Another British lawyer, Melanie Gingell, a barrister with Took's Chambers in London, has also been an observer at the Istanbul trial. The court is based in prison outside the city. When she was there in November there were legal delegations from France, Germany, Switzerland and Canada monitoring the trial.

"The backdrop to this trial appears highly politicised," she noted, "with the arrests taking place after the peace talks between the PKK and the Turkish government are said to have collapsed in Oslo."